Denmark  Oral History

Preben Munch-Nielsen

Describes a fishing boat used to carry Jews to safety in Sweden [Interview: 1989]

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 US Holocaust Memorial Museum - Collections

Transcript

We got this boat. It was bought by [cough] the bookbinder Kjaer from.... It was a boat laying in the harbor of Elsinore and that was a very good boat, a sound boat built in the beginning of the '30s. It was of course a wooden boat with a good engine and it was able to go rather quick, about eight or nine miles, and that is, that is much for a motorboat. And when it started, Kjaer, the first night I remember had two or three, no two trips to Sweden and I think we got ten to twelve passengers every time. And then later on we had in October seven hundred Jews and, totally I know that this boat brought about one thousand four hundred people from Denmark to Sweden.

Preben was born to a Protestant family in Snekkersten, a small fishing village. The Germans invaded Denmark in 1940. Preben became a courier in the resistance. When the Gestapo (German Secret State Police) began hunting down Jews in Denmark in October 1943, Preben helped hide refugees in houses near the shore and led them to boats which took them to Sweden. Preben himself had to take refuge in Sweden in November 1943. He returned to Denmark in May 1945.